“The fact that I am a Filipino actor playing a Filipino role is crazy. Filipinos are the second largest Asian minority in the United States, and we’re hardly represented in the media and on television.”
― Nico Santos
“We, Filipinos, are really great about keeping a positive attitude and seeing the silver lining in all things. We’re survivors!”
― Nico Santos
“I hate that femininity in a gay men is a ‘stereotype.’”
― Nico Santos
“Femme people exist, and they are layered and they are complex and they are intelligent.”
― Nico Santos
“I often get asked which ‘Superstore’ episode is my favorite. That’s such a hard question to answer. It’s like being asked: Which of your children (and by children, I mean shoes) do you like best?”
― Nico Santos
“In the early ’80s, my family vacationed to the United States.”
― Nico Santos
“My brother joined the Army. He served multiple tours in Iraq and now lives in Texas with his family.”
― Nico Santos
“We must work to change in our hearts and minds what it looks like to be undocumented. It is the high schooler dreaming of college who isn’t aware of his status. It is the single mother working grueling hours in a warehouse just to provide for her children. It is the family that sits next to you in church. It is your neighbor.”
― Nico Santos
“We all need to call upon our lawmakers to create a path to citizenship for hard-working, law-abiding undocumented people and their families.”
― Nico Santos
“I don’t think people should be afraid of portraying people with accents, especially Asian accents.”
― Nico Santos
“People with accents exist and just because they have an accent doesn’t mean they’re less intelligent or what-have-you.”
― Nico Santos
“First of all, Asian representation hardly exists to begin with.”
― Nico Santos
“It still baffles my brain that I actually get to portray a character on American television that’s this gay, femme-y Filipino guy.”
― Nico Santos
“It’s really mind-boggling to me when I think about where I started and where I am now. It’s kind of insane.”
― Nico Santos
“I didn’t want to do Chekhov or Shakespeare. So I switched my major from acting to costume design. Eventually, I got a job working as a wardrobe assistant for a theater company. I would dress the actors, fix their costumes, do the quick changes for them and all that stuff.”
― Nico Santos
“My intent when I moved to L.A. was to get in good with the comedy clubs and, eventually, try to break into Comedy Central and have my half hour special.”
― Nico Santos
“Superstore’ is, like, my fifth acting job.”
― Nico Santos
“I came out to one or two people in high school and then it wasn’t until I was a freshman in college that I was fully out of the closet. It was like the late ’90s.”
― Nico Santos
“When I moved to L.A., I had no intention of really pursuing acting. I wanted to focus on stand-up. It’s crazy to me that my acting career took off much faster than my stand-up career.”
― Nico Santos
“I’m portraying out characters, I’m portraying femme characters, characters that are really outside of the box. I never thought I would get that opportunity to portray those characters at all, much less have a career that I have.”
― Nico Santos
“My brownness is something that I can’t hide. There are some straight-acting or straight-passing queer people out there, but I’m not one of them. This is something I would rather not have to hide.”
― Nico Santos
“My dad was undocumented for a period of time, my mom was also undocumented for a period of time.”
― Nico Santos
“Within the Filipino community, everybody knows somebody who’s undocumented.”
― Nico Santos
“Shows like ‘Superstore’ and certainly ‘Pose’ are leading the way and showing queer people of color in a much more complex, nuanced light that we’ve never seen.”
― Nico Santos
“What I’ve come to find out is it doesn’t matter if you’re selling a $10,000 gown or toilet paper: The everyday sort of humdrum of customer service and retail is the same.”
― Nico Santos
“You rarely see a Filipino family on TV.”
― Nico Santos
“In high school the very first job I got was I worked as a cashier in Burgerville, which is this fast food place in Oregon. I kind of grew up to be a spoiled little kid so my dad was like, ‘You’re going to get a job for the summer!’ I was this clueless immigrant like, ‘May I take your order? Sorry sir, I don’t know what I’m doing!’”
― Nico Santos
“I love my mom! She’s just great and so happy for me that I’m living my dream.”
― Nico Santos
“I’ve done retail before.”
― Nico Santos
“I think any immigrant who comes to this country also knows somebody who is undocumented.”
― Nico Santos
“I’m from the Philippines and I moved to this country when I was 16.”
― Nico Santos
“I’ve gotten auditions with as little as two hours’ notice. Those don’t go so well!”
― Nico Santos
“I had a rough start when I moved to L.A. I couldn’t find a job, so I couch-surfed for the first two years.”
― Nico Santos
“My family always believed in me, even when I didn’t. Having that love and support made me not afraid of failing. I knew my mom would be proud of me just for taking a chance and pursuing my dream.”
― Nico Santos
“I’m so Filipino. I’m fluent in Filipino.”
― Nico Santos
“I should have been born a crazy rich Asian because I do have expensive taste. I have champagne taste but I’m on a beer budget.”
― Nico Santos
“I miss Philippine mangoes, you just can’t get them here. Mangoes, you can’t get lanzones here, you can’t get siniguelas, all these fruits that I grew up with.”
― Nico Santos
“Never in a million years would I have imagined that this is how my life would have ended up. I just thought I would be living in the States, doing a regular job.”
― Nico Santos
“Everything you could imagine Michelle Yeoh being, she lives up to that.”
― Nico Santos
“My mom is definitely crazy. She would totally be a stage mom if I was a child actor.”
― Nico Santos
“I think I understand why most actors and actresses are insane, because having to go through an emotional roller coaster as your job every day of your life would make somebody absolutely loopy.”
― Nico Santos
“When I worked at Dior, Paris Hilton and Kathy Hilton came one time and they were kind of crazy.”
― Nico Santos
“When I got that role of Mateo in ‘Superstore,’ it was such a huge victory for me, professionally and personally.”
― Nico Santos
“I never thought an opportunity like ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ would ever come my way.”
― Nico Santos
“The fact that I’m able to portray these complex, fully realized, queer Asian characters? I never thought it would be in this position. You just never see those types of characters and that type of representation.”
― Nico Santos
“I always thought that when I got into this business that I was going to have to downplay my Asianness and downplay my queerness, which is not an easy thing for me to do.”
― Nico Santos
“I come from Oregon, which is this super-white state, so I didn’t really have a lot of Asian friends in high school and college. And my background’s in comedy, and your friends are just your peers in comedy, which is a whole mix of people.”
― Nico Santos
“It wasn’t until I worked on ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ that I all of a sudden have this Asian crew of friends that I became super close with.”
― Nico Santos
“Especially when you’re queer and you’re a person of color, you’re so used to being the token on set. Inevitably you have to answer dumb questions from someone. You’re the ‘other.’”
― Nico Santos
“I never thought in a million years I’d be involved in a project that celebrated the fullness of my identity of being queer and Asian.”
― Nico Santos
“Generally I try to be as healthy as possible, but it’s hard to be on set because anything and everything is available to you. I’m healthy half the time, and half the time I’m like, ‘Sure let me go back and see whatever snack they have laid out.’”
― Nico Santos
“I grew up in the Philippines and we had all this amazing fresh seafood, but uni was something that I was weirded out by. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I was like, ‘Let me just go ahead and try this.’”
― Nico Santos
“I don’t cook as often as I would like.”
― Nico Santos
“I like making adobo, because it’s easy and it keeps in the fridge for a while. Or I’ll make pasta with bolognese – something I can make a big batch of and can keep eating for the rest of the week.”
― Nico Santos
“I did stand-up comedy for a long time in San Francisco, and then I was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to move to Los Angeles and try and make it!’”
― Nico Santos
“A lot of people know me from my character that I play on ‘Superstore,’ Mateo, and I’m not interested in playing straight roles. I’m all about playing queer roles.”
― Nico Santos
“I want to show people out there that there’s such a huge spectrum of people within the queer and Asian community.”
― Nico Santos
“I lost my accent pretty quickly, so everyone assumes I was born and raised in America. But I’m very much still in touch with my Filipino roots. That will never go away.”
― Nico Santos
“Pinoy Pride, always!”
― Nico Santos
“Superstore’ is the most amazing work environment ever. Every single person on set is someone you’d call a friend. We have the best crew, as well, and we all hang out even when we’re not working. We push each other to be better, and we bring it out of one another. I have learned and grown so much.”
― Nico Santos
“The best comedy is based on truth.”
― Nico Santos
“I thought my high school would either be like ‘Beverly Hills 90210’ or ‘Stand and Deliver’ – it was just a run-of-the-mill high school.”
― Nico Santos
“Oregon is home to me.”
― Nico Santos
“It’s really great to see the queer landscape really change to include everybody and make the rest of the world understand that we’re not just one or two things. There’s so much about the queer community that needs to be represented.”
― Nico Santos
“I was in the closet up until I moved to the U.S. But I was always one of those kids who couldn’t really hide being gay. Some queer kids are just more straight-passing than others. I was not one of those kids.”
― Nico Santos
“The fact that I get to play a queer Filipino on television and another queer character in ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ is huge. I never thought I’d have a career being myself. I always thought that being an actor in Hollywood meant that I would have to put that side of me on the back burner.”
― Nico Santos
“Ellen DeGeneres is a huge influence in my life. She’s one of the reasons why I wanted to do stand-up comedy. I was a big fan of her stand-up before she even came out of the closet.”
― Nico Santos
“You know you’ve made it when you’re a GIF.”
― Nico Santos
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